Senate Health Bill Shelved After More Senators Oppose

After two more Republican senators announced their opposition to the Senate health care proposal – bringing the total to four – GOP leadership appears to have abandoned the legislation.

Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah added to the ranks of the opposition on Monday, joining Maine’s Susan Collins and Rand Paul of Kentucky. With no support from the Democratic Party, the forty-eight senators still supporting the legislation would not have been enough to bring the bill for a vote.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the Senate will now pursue separate paths of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, with one bill solely repealing the legislation and another to overhaul America’s health care system.

“In the coming days, the Senate will vote to take up the House bill with the first amendment in order being what a majority of the Senate has already supported in 2015 and that was vetoed by then-President Obama: a repeal of Obamacare with a two-year delay to provide for a stable transition period,” McConnell said in a statement.

Moran and Lee cited the lack of cost controls in the bill as the reason for their opposition. “This closed-door process has yielded the [bill], which fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address healthcare’s rising costs. For the same reasons I could not support the previous version of this bill, I cannot support this one,” Moran said in a statement.

The bill that went down to defeat was crafted to fulfill campaign promises made by Republican Party officials – including President Trump – and also to free up more funds for a planned subsequent tax cut measure. The defeated bill essentially proposed eliminating taxes imposed by ObamaCare and eliminating Medicaid’s expansion over time. Those freed up funds could have then allowed for deeper tax cuts without imperiling the fiscal deficit.

In a tweet, Trump said “Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate,” adding, “Dems will join in!”